Walter Ireland’s laugh was a weak, wheezing thing that shook his chest like an earthquake nonetheless. Judging by his thin, olive green aura, the oxygen bottle strapped to the back of his chair, and the way the riot of pillows propped him up, we’d get more of our answers from his kids, not because he was going to hold out on us, but because he simply didn’t have the breath to speak for long.
We introduced ourselves to Walter and he gestured to us to sit down with the family. The table had enough mismatched chairs to seat eight, so we picked one on each side near the poker party. I sat on the side next to Jon—a tall man in his early fifties with receding hair the color of dust and a mustache stolen straight off a cowboy in a cigarette commercial. Solis took the seat next to what must have been Jen’s currently empty chair, judging by the cards facedown on the table.
“You want anything?” Jen asked, still standing between the table and the doorway and glancing around at everyone. “Dad is going to have his go juice.”
Walter shook his head and made a face.
“Oh yeah, you are,” Jen replied. “It’s after noon and the doctor says you have to drink it twice a day. I know it’s gross, but, hey, it could be worse—it could be blendered liver powder and wheatgrass like Dotty drinks. Num num!”
Walter’s mouth turned down and he coughed out, “All right. Nasty gunk.”
“I want some of that red stuff,” Jon said. “We’ve still got red stuff, right?”
“You mean red-red or pinky-red?” Jen asked.
“Red-red. Pinky-red is that dragon-fruit goop. Pfah!”
She looked at us. “We have Vitamin Water in whatever color you like and soda and plain, old-fashioned tap water. Or I can make some tea if you want.”
“Water is fine,” I said.
Solis nodded to indicate the same.
Jen raised her eyebrows at us. “Ooo . . . living on the edge—drinking tap water.”
“I hear fish fart in it,” Jon said with a wink at me.
Jen hustled around the open-plan kitchen that adjoined the dining area and fetched the drinks. She brought her father a small plastic bottle of some thick orange liquid and plopped down a bottle of purple Vitamin Water next to it before she sat down beside him and pried the lid off the orange goop. She pushed it into Walter’s hand, saying, “There y’go, Dad. Slug that crap down and then you can have the good stuff to wash away the taste.” She shot a look over her shoulder at me and Solis. “Acai and blueberry. I think it’s horrible, but Dad likes the stuff.”
“Better’n this,” Walter mumbled, lifting the small bottle in a shaking hand.
“My theory is that the combined tastes must be much better than the individual ones,” Jon added, “because that acai berry stuff is kind of weird.”
Walter started to offer him his orange glop. “Wanna find out?” It came out as a near whisper.
Jon waved him off. “Nope. You drink it, Dad. You’re a better man than I am.”
Walter wheezed another laugh, then guzzled his drink with a downturned mouth and a scowl.
“OK, so . . . what’s the question of the day?” Jen asked, turning to us as her father reached for the bottle of purple liquid.
“We have some questions about your sister, Ruth,” Solis replied.
Jen blinked and Jon scowled. Walter looked stunned.
“Ruthie?” Jen asked. “She’s been gone a long time. What kind of questions could you have? Have you found her?”
“No. But the boat on which she disappeared has been found and we wish to know more about the passengers.”
Jen blinked a little, her mouth working like a fish’s, and couldn’t quite form a reply.
Jon leaned forward, helping his father with the lid on the bottle of Vitamin Water, but keeping his focus on us. “What sort of thing do you want to know?”
“Did she talk about the trip?”
“Not a lot that I remember,” Jon replied. “But I wasn’t around much then. I suppose she would have been excited, though.”
Jen snorted and Walter shook his head.
“So she wasn’t looking forward to the trip?” Solis asked.
“She wanted it like fire,” Walter mumbled, wheezing.
Jon reached over the wheelchair and adjusted the valve on his father’s oxygen bottle. “Ruthie was boat crazy, so if she was going to go out with those high-roller types, of course she was excited. She loved that stuff.”
“Well, she liked her friends, too. I don’t think she’d have been as excited about it if they weren’t going along,” Jen added.
“Which friends, specifically? Do you remember?”
“Oh, Janice, of course—they were BFFs.” She looked at her brother. “What was that other girl’s name? The crazy one.”
“Which one? Half of Ruthie’s friends were crazy.”
“The one with the funny hair.” She turned her gaze back to me and Solis. “One of those blondes whose hair goes all green in the swimming pool. You know. Kooky. She was like a deckhand or something.” She looked back to Jon. “What was her name?”
“Sally?”
“Nooo . . .” Jen said, shaking her head. “That’s not right.”
Walter coughed around a word. Jen and Jon both leaned close to hear.
“What, Dad?” Jen asked.
I could barely hear the whispering of his breath as he repeated the word.
Jen looked up again. “Shelly. Dad says her name was Shelly.” She looked at her brother. “Does that sound right to you?”
Jon nodded. “Oh yeah. Now I do remember her. Shelly Knight. Which I remember because Janice didn’t like her as much as Ruthie did and she called her One-Night Shelly. They used to argue whether Shelly was a friend or a floozy.”
“Like I would remember that. I was, what, twelve?”
“Well, you might if you’d paid attention.”
“What came to my attention was the way you mooned around after Janice Prince.”
“Mooned around? I never moon—unless I drop my pants first.”
Solis cut into their developing argument. “Do you believe Shelly Knight was on the boat when it left?”
“I’d be really surprised if she wasn’t,” Jon said.
Jen nodded. Walter seemed to nod, too, but it could just have been that he was tired, since the energy around his head and body was very low. “Shelly,” he whispered, a slight scowl on his face. He motioned to his children and Jon leaned in to listen before Jen could turn around from looking at us.
Jon nodded for a few seconds at what his father was saying, then raised his head, frowning. “I think Dad’s really tired and he’s not making sense. He says he saw Shelly the last time we were down at the marina. But that couldn’t be right.”
“Why not?” I asked. “When was he last at the marina?”
“About a year ago. Before he went into the hospital this last time. We went down with the broker to finalize the sale of Dad’s fishing boat—nothing fancy, but he wasn’t going to use it and we kind of needed the money for the medical bills. But, anyway. He’s sure he saw Shelly sitting on the dock when we were there. I don’t remember that but he says he did. I think he’s imagining things, myself.”
Jen smacked him on the arm. “Don’t say that. Dad’s not senile.”
“I didn’t say he was. I just don’t think he’s remembering quite right. It was a year ago. A lot’s happened since then.”
“How could you misremember a girl with green hair?”
“These days there’s a lot of them I’d like to misremember. Ecch. Green hair.”
Jen made a face at him. “Bigot.”
“I don’t make fun of you for dyeing your hair.”
“That’s because I look good.”
“That’s because you dye it a nice color, not green. You look like a femme fatale from an old movie.”
Jen beamed at him. “Thank you!”
Solis’s cell phone vibrated and made a rattling sound against the chair where his pocket touched the seat. He
reached down and silenced it without looking. “So,” he started, “your sister didn’t have any fear about this trip?”
“Oh, heck, no!” Jen said. “It sounded like a great adventure. I wish it—I wish it hadn’t been. I wish she’d stayed home.” Her face went suddenly and deeply sad.
Jon put his hand over hers on the tabletop. “It’s all right, honey. We all miss Ruthie.”
“I just wish I’d been nicer to her. I wish I hadn’t been such a brat to her.”
“You were a brat; you were twelve.”
“I said some mean things to her before she left. I guess I was jealous, but I wish I could take them back. And I can’t.”
Jen teetered on the verge of tears until her father interrupted with a soft snore. Both adult children jumped a bit and looked at their father. Walter had fallen asleep in his chair.
Jen wiped her eyes, smearing a bit of eyeliner on the back of her hand and sniffling around a wobbling smile. “Oh, Dad. Silly old Dad. Maybe we’d better put him to bed. . . .”
Jon stood up, unfolding to a comfortable six feet and stretching his arms a bit. “All right. Let’s do it. You get the door; I’ll drive.”
They paused and glanced at us. “Umm . . .” Jen said.
I stood up and Solis followed suit. “We’d better be going,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thanks. If you think of anything else about Ruthie’s friends or the trip, you’ll let us know, right?” I added, holding out my card.
“Oh. Sure.” Jen took my card and another from Solis and tucked them into the back pocket of her jeans. “I hope you find out what happened to her. We—we all really miss her.”
“We will let you know,” Solis offered.
Jen nodded and we let ourselves out as the Ireland kids put their father to bed.
Outside, Solis glanced at his cell phone and poked it a few times. Then he held it out to me.
I took it, not sure what I was going to see. On the big screen there was a photograph of a sheet of paper that was stained with green and black marks and yellowed unevenly all over. I couldn’t see more than that and started to hand back the phone, scowling in confusion. Solis reached over my arm and made the picture suddenly zoom larger.
“Oh,” I said in surprise, looking down at the photo of a page from the log book floating in a shallow tank of water. “Oh . . . my.” It was the passenger and crew manifest for the last voyage of the Seawitch. For the crew, two positions were listed: a captain/navigator and a cook.
Solis looked over my arm at the photo, then up at me. “Do you suppose the cook listed there could be Shelly Knight?”
“I’m not sure it could be anyone else. But if it was Shelly . . . who did Walter Ireland see on the dock last year?”
“Perhaps Shelly Knight.”
“Then why hasn’t she come forward before this?” I asked, mostly to get the question into the air, since I was sure we were both thinking it.
“We should see if we can find this woman.”
“Marina?” I asked.
Solis nodded.
SEVEN
As we returned to the marina, I remembered what the Guardian Beast had told me: “Find the lost.” Was Shelly Knight one of the lost or was she something else? Had she really been on board Seawitch at all? And if she had been, was the woman Walter Ireland had seen really her or someone who merely looked like her in the memory of an old, sick man? How many women with pale green hair were there in the area? There were plenty of places to go swimming around Seattle so any number of blond women with swimming-pool hair might have been mistaken for her, and we had no picture to go by. We’d have to find someone at the marina who could remember her. If we were very lucky they might have an old photo or we might get an ID photo or a hit on the Internet, though the chances weren’t good for a woman of no notoriety who may have vanished for twenty-seven years. And I hoped Solis’s magical technician was able to salvage more useful information from the log book to confirm or deny the presence of Shelly Knight on the fateful final voyage of Seawitch; if she were still alive it would be our first real break.
The marina had just thrown off its morning coat of fog and the pavement and docks still gleamed with moisture when we arrived. Sailors are a ridiculously early lot, I noticed. But I suppose when you plan your voyage by tide tables, you don’t waste time sleeping in when the tide is in your favor. There wasn’t a throng of people, but the place was far from deserted. It would be a busy place in a few weeks, when school was out, but for now the residents, workers, and boat folk were up and about in scattered groups and singles, going about their business. The boat-repair yard at the south end was already busy and we could hear the hooting of the travel lift backing away from the edge of the dock as it trundled into the yard with a midsized sailboat hanging from slings between its chunky metal trusses. The boat must have been thirty feet long or more and it looked like a toy in the blue-painted arms of the massive lift.
Seaview Boatyard was a busy little place with nearly every available space in the yard filled with boats getting fixed or cleaned up for summer—every kind of boat you could imagine, from old classics built of wood to high-tech racing sailboats, from fiberglass motor yachts to charter fishing boats built of steel. But in spite of the number of boats in the yard, the activity was laconic.
I took point on this one, being a female and therefore not in danger of losing my street cred by showing some ignorance of boats. We followed various directions from the staff until we found the boatyard manager, a curly-haired, rough-skinned man in his mid-fifties named O’Keefe—called Keefer, naturally. I asked why the packed yard was so sparsely busy.
He rocked back and forth from toe to heel as he spoke, as if the ground were too still for his taste. “Well, it’s midweek and a lot of these boats are in for yard work—that is, we’re doing the work, not the owners—so they have to wait their turn, since we only have so many crew here. A few have their own contract crew in—shipwrights and specialists who come in on contract to the owner—and we’re fine with that. So only a couple are being worked on by the owners themselves, and a few by my guys, a couple more by contractors. It’ll be about twice as busy on the weekend when people come in to do their finish-up work and splash the boat.”
“Splash?” I asked.
“Put it back in the water. Not a tricky thing with steel or fiberglass, but you have to be a little delicate with wood since they can dry out if they’re standing on the hard—up on dry land, that is—for a protracted time. Three or four days is no big deal for a large boat, and with the fog we’ve been having, that’s like putting a nice, wet blanket on ’em every night. But when it’s hotter, old woodies can dry out pretty thoroughly in a week or two and the wood shrinks up. Then you have to lower ’em back in slowly and sometimes leave ’em in the slings overnight to swell up and seal all their seams again. That takes a little patience.”
“I imagine so. How long have you been working here?”
“Here? Only a couple of years.” My heart sank. “I’ve been in the business near thirty, but I was at the old yard on the canal until last year when they closed up and moved out here.”
“Would you have met a woman named Shelly Knight? She was some kind of cook or deckhand for hire out here between twenty-five and thirty years ago. Blond. We heard she was back in the area.”
“Well . . . maybe. Boat people get around, y’know. You always run across people you knew from some marina you moored up in five years ago or some regatta you went to or something like that. Can’t say the name rings a bell, though.” Keefer shrugged. “But it’s not like itinerant crew are running around with name tags on their chests, either. Sometimes you only know these guys by first name—or, worse, just a nickname—and pay ’em in cash or kind and never see ’em again.”
“What do you know about Seawitch? The boat that came in a few days ago, abandoned.”
“Oh, our ghost ship?” He let out a short laugh. “She’s a legend, that one. Custom built out at the old Lake Uni
on Shipyard back in the twenties. Port Orford cedar on white oak frames to a Ted Geary design. Steel keel shoe and bow protectors. Twin engines—upgraded to diesel in the fifties. All hand-fitted mahogany and such inside. Nice boat. Well kept up until she went missing. Nicely fitted out, too, I hear. Pity what’s become of her.”
“What’s the rumor mill say about it?”
“About Seawitch? That she’s haunted. You know how sailors are. One old dog says she was doomed from the start—that she was built with parts from a wrecked ship, which is patently not true. Another fella on the dock claimed he heard sounds from her the other night, like someone was tearing the boat apart, but he says there was no sign of anything amiss when he went to take a look.”
“What was he doing out there?” I asked. “I thought B was the legal-status dock.”
“Nah. It’s all mixed up. He lives out there—Stu Francis his name is. Out at B Thirty. The marina wouldn’t admit it, but they kind of like to have someone living on every dock if they can. Kind of like getting free security, though the Port of Seattle may not feel the same way—they have a bit of a love/hate relationship with live-aboards because of the legal and environmental bullshit—pardon my French. One thing you can count on, though: Live-aboards will always check up on strange noises and come to a call for help. Save many a boat from damage by being first on the scene. Funny bunch; know what everyone’s doing—how could you miss it with such thin walls and neighbors five feet outside your window?—but they look away when it’s not their business. They all act like they don’t know a thing until someone’s in trouble. Then they’re on it like it’s their own boat shipping water or beating itself to death in the wind. Even if they can’t stand you, they’ll jump in and save your ass and your boat, too.” He shook his head and repeated, “Funny bunch.”
We didn’t get a lot more out of Keefer and we couldn’t go wandering around the docks without a key, so we headed for the marina office, past the large and oddly proportioned statue of Leif Eriksson mounted on a stone plinth and surrounded by smaller standing stones in a boat-shaped oblong. I’d long ago discovered that the people of Ballard prize their Nordic heritage, but I still found the tribute to Seattle’s Scandinavian immigrants a bit bizarre. Foreshortened as it was from below, Leif’s head seemed a bit too large, and I always half expected him to raise the ax he was leaning on and demand I answer a question about the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow. I admit I gave the big bronze statue a wary look as we passed by, but it remained inert.
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